Bing Vs. Google: Shaping Your SEO Strategy

Typically when sites are honing their SEO strategy, they focus on following all the Google rules. This makes sense – Google is the dominant search engine, so staying on the good side of their standards is a smart idea. At the same time, Google isn’t the only search engine out there, and ignoring other site’s standards can be a recipe for trouble, blocking you from ever reaching certain audiences. To really gain maximum exposure, you need to reach them all.

If you’ve been working exclusively by the Google playbook, take some time to learn the difference between their rules and Bing’s. From there you can decide which rules to prioritize in your final SEO strategy.

Backlink Basics

In the Google strategy guide, backlinks are important, and if low quality sites link back to your page, you can find your page ranking slipping. That’s why Google’s disavow links feature is so important – it allows you to identify bad backlinks and essentially disconnect them from your page, saying that you don’t approve of these spam links. The biggest challenge, though, is finding out who’s creating these links so that you can employ the disavow feature.

Backlinks matter to Bing too, but not nearly as much as in the Google rankings. Instead, Bing focuses more on user engagement and keyword domains. With that in mind, don’t worry about trying to navigate Bing’s crawl to eliminate links. To improve your Bing ranking, your time is better spent improving another component, such as your click-through rate.

URL Naming

When placing keywords for your website, Bing wants to see your most important terms placed in the URL. This can be a challenge from an optimization standpoint, since typically more than one keyword is relevant to a given page, and may force you to prioritize certain terms in your overall strategy.

Google, on the other hand, cares a lot about keyword optimization, but they don’t care where you put them – as long as you’re not “keyword stuffing.” This is an example of a time when Google’s priorities align with the quality of the result – what’s in the URL doesn’t tell you much about the content on the site. Considering how much criticism Google fields for arbitrary penalties, in this case they seem to have the logical advantage over Bing.

Originality And Ownership

Both Google and Bing place a high priority on unique content choices, and duplicating your content across the web can harm your overall ranking. However, Bing has a special partnership with Klout that allows site owners to track down cases where other sites use their content without quoting it. Zapping plagiarism where it lives, this ownership tool allows the original author to claim the content.

By and large, you’ll find that a good SEO strategy will benefit you across platforms, but that doesn’t mean you can focus on one set of rules to the exclusion of the other. Google controls more that 50% of the search engine marketshare, but Bing is holding steady and shares rules with Yahoo, so they aren’t to be ignored. For best results, your site will need to balance the standards across the web.